Thirty-one years ago last weekend, in the small Czech town of Dvur Kralove,
a whole herd of giraffes was shot. Nobody was ever told why. This sounds
like the opening of a Kafka novel, but it is a real event, and one that
came to fascinate the British journalist JM Ledgard so much that he wrote
a novel on the subject. David Vaughan reports.

At the height of communist rule the charismatic director of the zoo in
Dvur
Kralove, Josef Vagner traveled to Kenya and came back with an entire herd
of giraffes. It is strange to imagine these exotic and elegant creatures
sailing up the Elbe River to chilly Czechoslovakia at the end of their
epic journey, and certainly the idea captured the imagination of JM
Ledgard, until recently working as a journalist in Prague. He decided to
investigate
the story, which turned out to be full of Cold War intrigue and symbolism.

At first the giraffes seemed to thrive; they bred and became the largest
herd ever to be kept in captivity. Suddenly, in early April 1975, the zoo
was sealed off by the police, and by the end of the month, the entire
heard had disappeared. On a phone line from Kenya, where he now lives, JM
Ledgard picks up the story.

"The Czechoslovakian state, all the way up to the level of the
Politburo, made it a state secret. So these giraffes were literally deemed
not to exist any more. They were all of them shot, twenty-three of them
were pregnant at the time, and they were literally liquidated."

Amid all this secrecy, various conspiracy theories developed about what
could have happened. Talking to now long retired veterinary surgeons and
secret police officers, Ledgard unraveled the version most likely to be
true - that the giraffes had picked up some virulent form of foot and
mouth.

"Obviously this would have had devastating economic
consequences. In
true communist fashion they decided to lie and ruin various people's lives
to cover up the whole incident. And the interesting thing today is that
still the Czech state has not come clean on the incident. My hope is - on
the anniversary - that the Czech government will finally tell the zoo in
Dvur Kralove, why the giraffes were killed, because, incredibly, every
year since 1975, the zoo director had asked the Czech government, 'Why did
you kill the larges herd of giraffes ever assembled anywhere in the world
and yet I have yet to receive a single document in writing?'"

Ledgard's book, called simply "Giraffe", is not just journalism.
He is a self-confesssed zoo fetishist with literary ambitions, and the
book
is a haunting and poetic account - narrated in part from the giraffe's own
point of view - of how far human folly and vanity can go, in tandem with a
political system that is both closed and inhumane.